Truckies get fit

CQ University research fellow Mitch Duncan says the 10,000 Steps challenge will run for about six weeks and involve workers in road, rail, air and sea transport industries.

He says improving the health of transport workers will benefit the whole economy.

"We come to a standstill without the transport industry," he says.

"Most of these people face some pretty tough challenges if they're doing long drive times or long work hours in pretty confined spaces, where they don't have a lot of flexibility to get out there and get as active, or make the healthy choices."

He says it will be hard for some workers to meet the daily target.

"Obviously it's not like an office worker where we can just stand up from our desk and go for a walk," he says.

"Where we're trying to help them is particularly for the drivers if they do get the chance to have a break, is to maybe use that as an activity break because that will hopefully also increase their alertness."

He says it's the first time they've targeted a specific industry.

"A lot of them do have higher rates of chronic disease than what we would like to see and obviously that's not good for us, because the transport industry, if these workers are sick it's not good for productivity," says Dr Duncan.

He says response from industry has been positive.

"We've had quite a number of large organisations in transport come on board and been really proactive in getting this started," says Dr Duncan.

"But also we're just trying to reduce generally the amount of chronic disease that is in society."

Dr Duncan says they'll also be collecting information at the end of the challenge.

"As part of the transport challenge we will be awarding Queensland's most active workplace but with this part of the project, we're actually going along and inviting everyone who takes part to be part of the evaluation of 10,000 Steps," he says.

He hopes organisations will share how they've promoted physical activity within their business to see if this can be applied to other industries.

"We've got big plans to do other industries in the back half of this year and hopefully we can focus in on construction and natural resources next," says Dr Duncan.